NAB: streaming-media boost

by
Jason Meserve
, | 26 Apr 01

ViewCast will release EZStream – its streaming-media capture and delivery service for small businesses – from April 30.

At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference yesterday, the company demonstrated EZStream for the first time. It uses a Java applet, and users can capture live or recorded media on a Mac and edit, encode and publish it to the Web. ViewCast is partnering with Activate to host the streams from $25 a month for 100 views.

"We want to make it easy from a technical perspective, and flexible in terms of pricing, for companies to get into streaming media," said John Caufield, president of online solutions at ViewCast.

EZStream's Java applet needs to be downloaded by the user only once. A smart download-like feature scans the user's PC for installed hardware and downloads only the software necessary to support the target machine.

The first release of EZStream's wizard will support only the Windows Media format. However, users can encode to the Mac-supporting RealNetworks format themselves. The hosting service supports both formats.